Longtime readers will know that TheBoyfriend™ and I got some property for a VERY good price awhile back and it’s been our intention to build our dream house on it. That is still our plan however we don’t want to build less than what we want on the property (because once it’s built, it’s there, and it’s not like you can just knock it down later and live in a tent until you get the new one built), and right now, we simply can’t afford to put the house we want there (not that we want some huge mansion, but I’m guessing building the house we want is maybe $40-50K above our current budget. In the meantime, we’ve been dumping our money into rent payments that don’t do any more than put a roof over our heads for another month and fund our landlord’s retirement. Neither of us are that financially minded, but we’ve come to the conclusion that THAT is probably not the best way we could be using what money we’ve got.
So, we’ve decided to try to take advantage of the buyer’s market and Obama’s $8k first-time homebuyer tax credit to get into a nice little starter home (so nobody can say we aren’t doing our part to help rebuild the economy and the housing market). We’ve met with the bank to determine what we can afford (and yes, I mean what we can afford, not what we are “approved” for), and were pleasantly surprised that we can get a mortgage of just under what we’re currently paying in rent for about $20K higher than we were expecting to be able to (which makes us ask, WHY didn’t we look into this sooner…..). So now we’ve got ourselves a realtor and the hunt has begun!
This weekend (hopefully starting tonight) will be our first time to actually go seeing the INSIDE of a few of the listings we’ve been given by our realtor or found on our own. We’ve headed out to look at the outside and neighborhoods of the houses that are in town (we’re also STRONGLY considering moving to a slightly bigger city, or the area around it, that is about an hour from our current residence), and we’ve seen that (not unexpectedly) there is alot more crap for sell than there is places we’d actually want to live, but, mixed in there are a few places that really seem to have alot of potential. But we won’t know til we get inside.
And therein lies the biggest problem with me. I have pretty high standards and pretty much summarily dismiss most of the listings I look at, but I have a tendency to get very excited when I come across one that appears to meet those standards. Yet I worry about getting as excited as I do, when I haven’t seen the inside (or in one case even the outside) of a house, except in pictures accompanying the listing, let alone hearing the results of a home inspection). So far there are two (maybe three, one’s a bit more iffy) homes we’d REALLY like to see (we’ll look at a few of the others because you never know, but…). We have a showing schedule for our top pick at 6:30 tonight!
Oh, dude, I love how the comment area slides out. Seriously.
Each of you needs to stop and make yourself a list of features you want. Then determine which of them are absolutely non-negotiable, if any. Ours were a basement for my wife and a garage & workshop for me plus main living area aoo on one floor for both of us. If it didn’t meet any non-negotiable, we didn’t bother. Saved a lot of time.